Today marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, where the US Navy destroyed four Japanese fleet carriers for the loss of one and turned the tide of the Pacific war in favour of America just six months after the disaster at Pearl Harbour.

There was still a lot of hard fighting required over the next three years, and in some respects it got harder as the US got closer to Japan, with the terrible combat in the war’s final battle at Okinawa being a factor in President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan rather than invading.

But after Midway the Japanese were never on the front foot again and rather than expanding into their new Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, they were forced to fight a grinding defensive war, ultimately falling back on Japan itself.

Dauntless Dive Bombers

The victory involved some elements of good luck, but it was enabled by the bravery, skill and resourcefulness of pilots like Wade McClusky and Dick Best, and also of hundreds of men, lost to history, who showed the same abilities in places like ship yards, and the smarts of Admirals like Nimitz and Spruance.

But the real key to the American victory was that they had partially cracked the Japanese naval codes and, with some educated guesswork, were able to figure out where and when the Japanese would strike, and with what. As a result the Americans could lay a trap.

The battle technically lasted from June 4 to June 7, but the real action came on June 4 when the trap was sprung and all four Japanese carriers in their attacking fleet were destroyed, although it would take until the next day for a couple of them to sink.

Rather than reading that Wikipedia link however, you should honour this great victory by watching the movie Midway – not the plodding 1976 version which I saw as a kid, but the one made in 2019 by Roland Emmerich, who both produced and directed it. He’s better known for huge, splashy, trashy action movies like Independence Day and is also very much a Democrat and LGBT activist in the US. As such it’s surprising that this Midway is such an old-fashioned war movie, with no hidden messages about anything at all and one that openly celebrates courage, decency and honour. But apparently the movie was a passion of his and when big studios turned it down he raised the money himself. It is one of the most expensive independent movies ever made.

The surprise continues with actors like Woody Harrelson, who got his start in the TV comedy series, Cheers, in the 1980’s and who normally excels in “unstable” characters, playing Admiral Nimitz with all the sobriety and seriousness of the man himself. Similarly for singers like Mandy Moore, who portrays Dick Best’s wife with vulnerable but steely courage and love. The Japanese figures of Admiral Yamamoto , Admiral Yamaguchi, and ordinary Japanese pilots and sailors are also portrayed with compassion.

That’s not to say the movie is Politically Correct. In one scene near the end there is no hesitation in showing the cruelty of a Japanese destroyer captain as he brutally disposes of POW Bruno Gaido by throwing him overboard tied to an anchor after he refuses to answer questions.

In fact the non-PC quality of the movie slaps you in the face right from the start when it opens in Tokyo in 1937 with a British Admiral, annoyed at the “bloody ridiculous” Japanese custom of catching ducks with nets, telling his American counterpart, Intelligence Officer Edwin T. Layton, that he won’t miss Japan and that “The next time I see the little buggers I hope it’ll be over the sights of a 14 inch gun”.

That scene is also an example of one of the other great strengths of the film; it captures all the key elements of the story in quick, concise scenes that allow people utterly unfamiliar with the history to understand exactly what is going on. In that opening we see Yamamoto telling Layton that if Japan’s oil supplies are threatened they will have to go to war against the USA.

It took the awful movie Pearl Harbour (2000), three ponderous hours to cover what Midway does in about one hour as we see the attack on Pearl and the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo (and the survivors experiences in China), while also cramming in the vital scenes showing Nimitz’s appointment as Pacific Commander, where he is told how grim the situation is, and Layton’s struggle to recover from the intelligence failure – his failure – of December 7, plus the little known American attack on the Marshall Islands in early 1942.

Similarly we move through scenes of the constant training of the pilots, and the risks and deaths involved in that, the effect of the Battle of the Coral Sea on Layton and his Intelligence team as they try to convince Nimitz that the island of Midway is next, and then of course the Battle of Midway itself.

The main characters are steadily introduced in these scenes in the same quick, concise manner that makes you immediately understand what drives them and what they’re like. Best is arrogant and cocky (what naval aviator isn’t?) but is softened a little as he becomes responsible for more lives than his own; his wife, Anne, passionate in her defence of him (“I often wondered what sort of woman would marry Dick Best and… well you have not disappointed”); Admiral Halsey (played by Dennis Quaid) gruff and smart; McClusky carrying the weight of commanding the likes of Best.

But there’s also humor; the scene where Nimitz finally demands to meet Layton’s “genius” analyst, Commander Joseph Rochefort, clad in bathrobe and fluffy slippers, with his team of code-cracking “tuba players”. Similarly in scenes showing the camaraderie of the men.

Portrayed are men who strongly disagree with each other and piss each other off, but none of them are made out to be useless or a bad guy, another departure from many modern movies. For example the torpedo squadron commander Lindsey is often at odds with an angry Best who has little respect for him, but that changes as death begins to surround them, especially for the doomed torpedo bombers who completely failed and were slaughtered, yet made a crucial contribution to the battle by completely distracting the fighter planes defending the Japanese fleet.

There’s superb special effects of course, as you’d expect from a film today. But it’s never overdone. Two terrific scenes last seconds only: one where a downed US pilot floating in the water looks up and cheers on the dive bombers as they fall upon the Jap carriers; the second where the camera looks up through the water from underneath an American submarine as it launches a torpedo while a destroyer passes overhead and depth charges descend.

And that’s another great aspect of the movie in that it introduces two small but vital stories of the battle that have been largely ignored.

The decisive moment came when McClusky and his squadrons missed the Japanese fleet and had to back-search for it. McClusky made a cunning guess and found a destroyer that was clearly trying to catch up with the main fleet, so they followed it and the rest is history, with three dive bomber squadrons arriving at the same time, in the right place and far above the defending fighters who were busy killing the American torpedo bombers.

But the reason that destroyer was catching up was that it had been driving off a submarine, the USS Nautilus (not the nuclear one of course), which had tried to attack the Jap carriers – and that too is shown in intense, quick detail. Had they not tried there would have been no destroyer for McClusky to find and follow.

The other little back-story that I was impressed to see in the film was the effort to repair the carrier USS Yorktown, which had been heavily damaged in the Coral Sea battle and was expected to take months to repair. Nimitz ordered it to be done in 72 hours – and it was. I would have liked to have seen a few shots of the artificers, machinists and welders making on-the-spot decisions on repairs and doing them, plus some reference to the brownouts that occurred in Honolulu because so much electricity was being drawn in the repairs (see Victor Davis Hansons book Carnage and Culture for the details), but that’s a quibble. The fact that it’s in the movie at all is great.

As a final tribute the film ends with the faces of each main actor morphing into the real-life men, together with a brief epilogue of each, and then ends with Annie Trousseau, getting to perform the entire song she’s briefly seen singing in the earlier Officer’s Club scene. The song was originally done by Frank Sinatra during the war but I love this version more: All Or Nothing At All is also entirely appropriate for this story; I suspect Emmerich selected it, Trousseau certainly loved the chance to be a 1940’s torch singer and she nails it.

If, on a Saturday night, you want to see a great war movie that is accurate to history, expertly told, that really does honour brave men and a famous American victory, get this one. You won’t regret it.